What are some useful ways to optimize my work flow while using blender?
"Look great" is a term that means nothing (or means completely different things for everybody). "Beautiful scenes" How do we quantify that?

I happen to love Georges Seurat's drawings and Paul Signac's paintings. They are just a bunch of dots and unsharp images for others... Does Hyperrealism look great? Is this beautiful? I don't really care...

If you want to talk about noise and rendering time and concrete issues, then let's talk about them.

Noise is part of rendering with cycles, the more samples the less noise you will have, that simple.

The more samples the more computing time you need.

Every scene is different, depending on the complexity of your shaders you might need more or less samples to create an image with an amount of noise you can live with.

100 samples might be enough for certain things, some scenes need several thousands.

There is no magic button to render with low samples, fast and with no noise. Why would anyone not use it if it existed?

The closest thing to that is the new denoise option on 2.79, but even that comes at a price: it adds a bit more vRAM usage to the normal rendering, and still needs a decent amount of samples to work correctly.

Is your GPU not up to the task?

You have some choices: Get a better GPU, render in CPU or be patient.  

Low Cost-Quality-Rendering Time... you can choose any two you want.

3D rendering is a fine balance of expectations vs the reality of your computing power. Cheat as much as you can, simplify, optimize, decimate, bake, do whatever it takes to get closer to what you want within the limitations of your hardware and the time you have on this earth to render something you like.